The Gospel of Mary starts on page 7. The first six pages of the Coptic copy are lost, so in Marvin Meyer’s edition the gospel opens with a row of dots and a question that’s already halfway out of somebody’s mouth:
“…. Will matter then be utterly [destroyed] or not?”
We don’t know who asked it or what came before. And that one line already holds two of the marks this post is about, the dots and the brackets. Most of us read straight past them, which is a shame, because they’re the translator telling you exactly how much to trust each word.
I covered the basics in How to Read a Gnostic Text for the First Time. Let’s go further here and put two translations of the same damaged page side by side, so you can see what the scribe wrote and what a scholar decided.
The Manuscripts Have No Periods
Start with something that surprised me. Bentley Layton, in the front of his translation, points out that “the ancient manuscripts contain no headings, detailed numbering systems, or (in most cases) other marks to indicate divisions of text.” He adds that the Coptic manuscripts have no punctuation of the kind English uses.
So every period in your translation was put there by a modern person, and the same goes for every comma and quotation mark. The tidy section titles are modern too.
Layton says his headings “are not a part of the original text, and should be omitted when any part of this translation is quoted.” Meyer’s subheadings, by his own account, “are not in the texts themselves.” That heading reading “Mary Comforts the Other Disciples” is a label a scholar stuck on the shelf, and the scribe in Egypt never saw it.
A Field Guide to the Marks
Each edition explains its signs somewhere in the introduction. These are the ones Meyer uses in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures:
- Square brackets [ ] mark a hole the editors think they can fill. Meyer calls it “a textual lacuna that has been restored.” A lacuna is just a gap, usually where the papyrus crumbled. Small restorations like “a,” “the” or “and” usually get no brackets at all.
- Dots … mark a hole nobody could fill with confidence. Three dots mean a line of Coptic or less is missing. Six dots mean more than a line, “a major break in the flow of thought.”
- Angle brackets < > mark a correction, where the editor thinks the scribe left something out or got it wrong.
- Braces { } mark letters the scribe probably added by mistake.
- Bold numbers in brackets, like [59], are manuscript page numbers. They aren’t restored words, even though they wear the same brackets.
Layton adds one more. In his book, words in parentheses “have been added by the modern translator, as an interpretive supplement implied by the text but not literally present within it.” Not every translator follows the same system, so the first thing to read in any edition is that short list of signs.
Same Hole, Two Repairs
Here’s the passage from the Gospel of Philip that has launched a lot of books about Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This is Meyer’s version:
“The companion of the [Savior] is Mary of Magdala. The [Savior loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he] kissed her often on her [mouth].”
And here’s Layton’s. I’ve taken out his line markers and changed nothing else:
“And the companion of the [. . .] Mary Magdalene. The [ . . . loved] her more than [all] the disciples, [and he used to] kiss her on her [ . . . more] often than the rest of the [disciples]”
Look at where the famous word sits. “Mouth” is in brackets in Meyer, and in Layton it isn’t there at all. Even “Savior” is a restoration in one book and a blank in the other.
Neither scholar is hiding anything. Layton says his rule was to admit “only restorations that are certain,” so he leaves the dots. Meyer’s team fills the gap with their best reading and marks it so you can see what they did.
And their guess has a reason behind it. A few pages earlier the same gospel says, “The perfect conceive and give birth through a kiss. That is why we also kiss each other.”
So the restoration is an argument from context. That’s a fair thing for an editor to make, but it’s still an argument. When a novel or a documentary quotes this line with the brackets stripped out, it’s building on a word nobody can read. An older post on this site, on Mary Magdalene, quotes a version without them too.
Brackets aren’t all equally shaky, either. Layton says he used them “conservatively,” and that a bracketed word is often “significantly intact in the manuscript.” Sometimes a whole word is gone, and sometimes it’s one faded letter.
Where Does the Sentence End?
No punctuation also means nobody marked where the sentences stop. Meyer’s note on that same Philip passage offers a second way to divide the line just before it:
“Wisdom, who is called barren, is the mother of the angels and the companion of the [Savior].”
Read it that way and the Savior’s companion is Wisdom, the divine figure Sophia, and Mary only arrives in the next sentence. Move one period and the line about a woman turns into a line about a heavenly power. Meyer puts his choice in the text and the other choice in a footnote, which is what a careful translator does.
When the Scribe Slipped
Angle brackets are rarer, and they’re where the scribe gets corrected. In Philip the three women who walked with the master are “Mary his mother, <his> sister, and Mary of Magdala.”
Meyer’s note admits that the manuscript actually reads “her sister.” He changed it because the next sentence says “his sister,” but the note grants the translation “may reflect” the original reading. So the editor fixed the line and left you the means to unfix it.
For example, in the Gospel of Mary, Mary asks whether a person sees a vision “<with> the soul <or> with the spirit.” Two tiny words were supplied there, and both of them are doing structural work in the question.
The Choices Nobody Marks
Some of the biggest decisions get no sign at all. Meyer says plainly that his versions are “translations, not lexical equivalencies,” meaning they aim for sense over word-for-word matching. His team writes “child of humanity” for the old “son of man” when the gender is unclear. In texts like the Secret Book of John, the highest God is “it” where the Coptic says “he.”
Meyer explains why. Coptic, he writes, “has no neuter gender but makes use of the masculine to refer to what is indefinite or neutral.”
That’s a reasonable call, and Layton makes it too, but you’d only know it was a call from the introduction. Nothing on the page itself flags it. I did a whole post comparing four translations of Thomas 3 and found the same kind of thing in one short saying.
Six Dots in the Middle of Heaven
The Gospel of Mary loses four more pages in the middle, right as Mary’s vision gets going. Her account breaks off at “and that is [what]….” and the manuscript page numbers jump from 10 to 15. When the text comes back, it opens on six dots and a single word, “it.”
That gap swallowed the start of the soul’s climb past the powers. Karen King, who translated Mary for Meyer’s volume, says the first power is probably Darkness, which she calls “the probable understanding of the text.” So even the name of a cosmic power is partly a reconstruction. I find that oddly moving, since the passage is about a soul that refuses to be pinned down by what others claim to know about it.
How to Read With the Holes Showing
- Read the list of signs first. It’s usually a page or two in the introduction. Five minutes there will change how you read the next five hundred pages.
- Check the brackets before you quote. If the line you love leans on a bracketed word, say so when you share it, or pick another line.
- Keep two translations open. Meyer restores more and Layton restores less. Where they disagree, you’ve probably found a hole.
- Read the footnotes on the lines you care about. That’s where you’ll find phrases like “Or, dividing the sentences differently,” which is a translator showing you the fork in the road.
- Drop the headings when you quote. Layton asks you to, and he’s right. They belong to the editor.
Near the end of her gospel, Mary finishes describing the soul’s ascent and stops talking. The text explains why: “she was silent, since it was up to this point that the Savior had spoken to her.” She went as far as her source went and no further. With a page full of brackets in front of you, that’s a pretty good rule to borrow.
Meyer’s sigla, his notes, and the Gospel of Philip are quoted from The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010). The Gospel of Mary and its introduction are by Karen L. King in the same volume. Layton’s editorial notes and his Gospel of Philip come from The Gnostic Scriptures, second edition, with David Brakke (Yale University Press, 2021).
